SHORTER NOTICES
The Workers' Educational Association: The First Fifty Years. By Mary Stocks. (George Allen & Unwin. 12s. 6d.)
THE W.E.A. is doubly fortunate in having, as its Deputy President and chronicler, Mrs. Mary Stocks, who has an enviable aptitude for making easy reading of a necessary succession of facts, figures, initials, and capital letters. Fifty years have seen the phenomenal growth of an organisation which set out with the basic policy of establishing a "partnership between en- lightened scholarship and working-class aspiration." That such a partnership can be successful has been effectively proved, and the names of those who have contributed their services to the W.E.A. are names which would lend distinction to any enter- prise. The influence of the W.E.A. has not, over the years, been restricted only to the cause of adult education, although its main premise has never been forgotten. Mrs. Stocks shows that its intervention on ques- tions of part-time education for adolescents, the raising of the school-leaving age, and free education for all, were not without effect, and that it has had constantly to wage campaigns against cuts in the Government's educational expenditure. Shades of Miss Horsbrugh! In view of the excellent presentation of this history, it may seem ungracious to suggest that it could have been bettered. None the less one might have wished that Mrs. Stocks had chosen to tell her story by viewing the Association rather as a sum of its parts than as an entity. The tale of the ordinary students remains untold. Impressive though the activities are of those who directed the W.E.A., their very scale dehumanises them and detracts from what, by the, nature of the Association, could well have been a much more intimate
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